During the fifth century B.C., the Golden Age of Athens, new forms of art and literature were being developed with extraordinary speed and energy. One of the most important of these forms was Tragedy, and the preeminence of Aeschylus , Sophocles, and Euripides in this innovative field was instantly recognized by their contemporaries. The second named of these three dramatists is often taken, perhaps too conveniently, as the benchmark by which the other two are judged.

Sophocles' date of birth is variously given, within narrow limits, by the ancient authorities, but 497 B.C. or 496 B.C. is the likeliest inference. The date of his death is more secure: 406 B.C. or 405 B.C. His lifetime thus spanned the fifth century B.C., that period of history which, more than any other, deserves the adjective classic; and Sophocles is often thought of among poets as the embodiment of that classicism. (If, though, by that term one means a perfection of form characterized by symmetry and restraint, with Sophocles as a kind of literary counterpart to the Parthenon, one will be in danger of going seriously astray.) Other details of Sophocles' life that scholars are inclined to accept as true from the notoriously unreliable ancient biographies are that his father was a businessman called Sophillus; that he had a musical education and achieved success in that sphere (he sang a solo part in the victory paean after the battle of Salamis in 480 B.C.); that his first victory in the principal dramatic festival, the Greater Dionysia, occurred in 468 B.C.; and that he never won less than second prize and came in first on at least eighteen occasions.

Besides his artistic achievements Sophocles held the post of treasurer (Hellenotamias) in either 443 or 442, and in the war to suppress a revolution in Samos from 441 to 439 he held the command as general along with Pericles as a reward, an ancient source records, for his Antigone. The reason given sounds hardly plausible, but since the dates, both absolutely and relatively, of Sophocles' plays are largely unknown, the story may count as possible evidence when the attempt to construct a chronological framework for his literary output is made. Later, after the military catastrophe of the Sicilian adventure in 413 in the war with Sparta, Sophocles was made a member of the Athenian senate. Other and more-suspect biographical details may be omitted from this sketch, except for two of a different kind: that he was a priest of an obscure god connected with healing; and that Aristophanes the comic poet, writing soon after his death, described him as a man of good humor, a verdict that other anecdotes support.

This good-humored, pious citizen of Athens wrote, on the most likely estimate, some 123 plays. (Among other writings ascribed to him, the name of one in particular, a prose work titled On the Chorus, provokes thought.) Apart from many extant fragments that range from the sizable remnants of a satyr play, The Trackers (Ichneutai ), down to scraps of perhaps no more than a single word, all that has survived of Sophocles' dramatic work are seven of his 123 plays. Of these seven there is a firm date, 409, for Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus is known to have been his last creation because it was produced posthumously in 401. As noted, there are grounds for placing Antigone close to 441. The date of Women of Trachis, a play whose authenticity has been doubted by a few in the past, is now generally put at sometime before Antigone; Ajax is also deemed to be relatively early. The date of Oedipus Rex has been endlessly discussed without agreement being reached; stylistically it seems not far from Electra, whose placing on the chronological table is bedeviled by equally endless discussion as to whether it precedes or follows Euripides ' Electra, written in 413 (not that one play is necessarily a covert critique of the other, as is commonly assumed). It appears, then, that of the seven surviving plays, the ones deemed to be "early" belong to a time when the poet was already in his fifties; and some of his finest choral writing, in Oedipus at Colonus, belongs to a man of ninety.

If Aeschylus was primarily interested in questions of inherited guilt within the family, and Euripides , Sophocles' contemporary, in exploring the myths of Greece with a critical eye on such matters as the position of women in society or the validity of conventional views of the gods, for Sophocles the center of interest was always the individual human being -- in particular the kind of human being who will not compromise even when he or she clearly perceives the advantages that compromise would bring. In that refusal to compromise Sophocles sees the seeds of a person's own destruction; yet at the same time such a character is plainly the kind that he admires and for whom he seems to invite admiration by others. In this respect his emphasis is on human free will: the hero has only to change his mind, to adapt to circumstances, and catastrophe will be averted. But there is another countertheme running through six of the seven tragedies, one that Sophocles does not hesitate to bring into play, even when it has no necessary foothold in the myth: the theme of oracular predictions and the inevitability of their fulfillment. This tension between human free will and divine predestination presents problems of interpretation to which no clear-cut answer can be given. Artistically the interest revolves around a person's own free decision, but the mechanistic data of the plot leave no doubt as to the outcome.

In what may be the first extant play, Women of Trachis , the relationship between these two themes is at its least satisfactory. In outline the story is about Deianeira and her errant husband, Heracles, whose love she tries to recapture by sending him the gift of a robe impregnated with a deadly poison that she believes will act as a love philter. Since this supposed philter was given to her by the centaur Nessus at the moment of his death and that death had been brought about by Heracles himself using poisoned arrows, Deianeira's action has been not unreasonably compared to that of a woman looking for a gas leak with a lighted match. The folly of such an action robs the plot of all credibility. Then the depiction of Heracles in his last hours, and in particular his dying command to his son to marry Iole, the current mistress whom he will be leaving behind, is so unsympathetic as to make him the most unpleasant major character in Sophocles. By contrast the unhappy wife Deianeira, for all her intellectual shortcomings, comes across as a gentle, loving creature; unfortunately for the audience, she, in the realization of her error, commits suicide while the play still has more than a third of its length to run.

An equal lack of balance, as it appears to modern tastes, is seen in the other two plays that seem to comprise this relatively early group: Ajax and Antigone. In the first the warrior Ajax is so incensed by the decision to award the armor of Achilles to Odysseus and not to himself that he resolves to kill the Greek generals Agamemnon and Menelaus. The goddess Athene, familiar from the Odyssey (eighth century B.C.) as Odysseus's patron goddess, causes Ajax to suffer from mental delusions, and he kills sheep in the belief they are the army commanders. Returning to sanity he is overcome by shame and resolves to commit suicide. The chorus and his wife, Tecmessa, plead with him, and after a choral interlude he appears onstage to deliver a speech that has given rise to contradictory interpretations. In it he seems to renounce suicide, but he does so in ambiguous language. Nothing is forever: the seasons change; darkness gives way to light; storms at sea are followed by calm; and sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care -- so why should I, Ajax, consider my earlier attitude to be an exception? The chorus takes him at his word and, in a dramatic technique that Sophocles uses elsewhere, delivers an optimistic ode just before the moment catastrophe strikes. What makes Ajax's refusal to compromise, which in this case means his suicide, so deeply impressive is the way in which he shows himself so fully aware of the arguments that a person of mild rationality might deploy against him.

But as with Women of Trachis, that suicide takes place with a third -- on this occasion rather more than a third -- of the play still to run. That third is occupied first by the arrival of Teucer, Ajax's half brother, who pronounces a kind of retrospective oration over the body; then by Menelaus, who gloats and forbids burial, opposed by Teucer; and last by Agamemnon, the commander in chief, again opposed by Teucer. Only Odysseus, seen at the beginning of the play in a none too heroic light, now intervenes in a more generous spirit, and burial is granted. The latter part of these final scenes following the suicide was condemned as an artificial extension two thousand years ago by the anonymous contributor to the ancient commentary. Certainly such a moral postmortem is not to everyone's taste, and although modern scholarship fights vigorously to insist that Ajax is an artistic unity, scholarly protests that there is nothing to apologize for only strengthen the feelings of unease among skeptics.

If one looks at the clockwork of the plot, Athene's treatment of Ajax is in retaliation for his disrespectful attitude toward her on earlier occasions preceding the story of the play itself; and one notices that Sophocles is so wedded to the theme of oracles that he has a prophet declare that the goddess's anger will only be operative for one more day, so that if Ajax can be restrained for that time, his death need not follow. Needless to say, that condition is not fulfilled.

Antigone represents the clash of two different philosophies shown through the medium of two conflicting personalities. Both sides, in their different ways, have right on their side, and therein lies the tragedy. Two brothers, sons of the deceased Oedipus, have died at each other's hands in their dispute over who is to be king of Thebes. The regent, Creon, their uncle, whose sister Jocasta had been Oedipus's wife, rules that Eteocles, who was the sitting tenant, may be buried with full honors. Polynices, the unsuccessful aggressor -- whose rights to the throne are hardly touched on in this play -- is, on the other hand, to be denied burial altogether. This denial of burial would not have struck an Athenian audience as in any way outrageous: it was standard treatment for those who raised a hand against their homeland. Antigone, however, feeling bound by family ties and respect for the gods of the underworld, is determined to give her brother burial, come what may. She persists in her disobedience of the regent, who condemns his niece to death, and this in turn precipitates the death of Creon's son Haemon, to whom she was betrothed, and of Creon's wife, Eurydice, both by suicide. In this way Creon is forced to see the error of his ways, but too late. Some have therefore sought to see in Creon the true hero of the piece; but those who do so must shut their ears to the beauty of the poetry put into Antigone's mouth and the nobility of the sentiments she expresses. The brutalities of political reality are not for her. As with Women of Trachis and Ajax, the presumed principal character disappears with a third of the play still to run; but even if Creon is not the hero, one is nonetheless sufficiently interested in his fortunes to feel a lively interest in the tensions of the plot right up to its conclusion.

Some of Sophocles's finest choral writing is to be found in this play. In particular there is the ode describing how the gods inflict on mortals a mental blindness that leads to destruction and is inherited from generation to generation -- the last efflorescence of a theme dear to Aeschylus but couched in language distinctively Sophoclean; and the next ode, just two brief stanzas, which deals with another kind of mental blindness, the one called Love. There is a close connection between these two odes, closer than anything found in any other Greek tragedy, and their relevance to the plot is immediate and obvious. The same cannot be said for the rather better known choral song that precedes them both. It is on the lines of "what a piece of work is man" and is a celebration of human intelligence and its achievements in the field of civilization; all boundaries crumble before it: only death remains unconquered. It is a fine and memorable statement from the classic age of Greece of what humankind may stand for. The trouble is that even after reams of discussion there is no agreement on what the function of this particular ode is at this particular point in this particular play. It reads as though it had drifted in from some anthology.

Antigone's role as a woman in a world of men, determined to stand up for what she conceives to be the right, was set against the moderating counsels of her well-meaning sister, Ismene. The same kind of pairing is found in Electra , in which the heroine of that name has a milder sister, Chrysothemis. On Electra opinions fluctuate widely. There are those who recognize Sophocles as being at or near the peak of his poetic form, while for others the basic plot, what Gilbert Murray so memorably describes as a combination of matricide with high spirits, is so morally revolting that no amount of skilled handling can overcome their revulsion at what they find. The plot is simple enough: Clytemnestra has killed her husband, Agamemnon, and now lives with Aegisthus. Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, had been spirited away to a place of safety, but his sisters Electra and Chrysothemis remain at home. By the time the play opens Orestes is grown up and returns to take vengeance on his mother for his father's death, with the full blessing of Apollo. The plan is to lull the suspicions of the guilty pair by having it reported to them that Orestes has died in an accident at the Delphic games.

As the play progresses Electra is seen from various angles: in conversation with the chorus, with Chrysothemis, and with Clytemnestra. She is drawn as a deeply embittered character, and even when the fictitious death of Orestes is announced, her emotions are first and foremost those of hatred for her mother and pity for herself. It is after that announcement that Chrysothemis reappears, full of joy, having found at Agamemnon's tomb an offering that only Orestes would have any motive for bringing. But Electra thinks she knows better and concocts an unrealistic plan of revenge from which Chrysothemis vainly attempts to dissuade her. The urn containing Orestes' putative ashes is now delivered by Orestes himself. Electra's emotional reaction leads to mutual recognition, and events now move rapidly. The guilty pair are slain, Clytemnestra first, then Aegisthus. It seems accepted by all concerned that matricide, under the circumstances obtaining in the play, is entirely justified. Some recent interpreters, however, have sought to bring Sophocles' view of the myth closer to that of Aeschylus and Euripides , both of whom decline to draw a line under the vengeance and look ahead to trouble yet to come.

One remarkable feature of Sophoclean dramatic technique is the way in which the playwright will concentrate on the immediate effect a scene may have on his audience, without troubling himself unduly over the relationship and compatibility of that scene with the overall structure of his play. Electra contains a notable example of that technique: the report of Orestes' death, an event that never took place, occupies more than eighty lines. W. S. Gilbert, also describing a death that never took place, once gave his character the words that he was providing "merely a corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." The Electra speech has many such details, but to the question why no answer wholly satisfactory to modern tastes has yet been found.

Of all Sophocles' plays, Oedipus Rex , a tragedy denied first prize either because it was ahead of its time or because of the vagaries of the Athenian voting system at the dramatic festival, is at once the least typical play and the one that has left the deepest imprint on posterity. In his Poetics (circa 335 B.C.) Aristotle , though his memory of the details of the play betrayed him on some points, plainly regarded it as the greatest masterpiece of the genre. It is full of comings and goings; it has scenes of contrasting emotional tensions. Politics and personal life are intermingled; delusory hope is followed by actual ruin; and all is seen against the background of man's powerlessness vis-à-vis the gods. Most Greek tragedies are unactable in the modern theater, but Oedipus seems in some way to anticipate the future and, imaginatively produced, has proved itself the most notable exception to that rule.

The tragedy is widely regarded as a masterpiece of construction. It is only when it is put under the microscope that one finds that in reality it is teeming with every kind of illogicality and inconsistency, some of which were mercilessly pointed out by Voltaire in the preface to his own Oedipe (1718). Oedipus begins with a city stricken by a plague. On King Oedipus's instructions the Delphic oracle is consulted. It tells the citizens they must expel the man who killed Laius, the king before Oedipus was crowned as a reward for overcoming the menace of the Sphinx. Oedipus's assumption of the kingship brought marriage with Laius's widow, Jocasta. Oedipus, who had been exposed to die on a mountain as an infant, believes himself the son of Polybus, King of Corinth. In reality he is the son of Laius, whom he had killed in a dispute on the road, and the woman to whom he is now married is his own mother. He pursues the investigation into the homicide of Laius with a determination from which nothing will deflect him, not even Jocasta's urgent begging when she senses the truth. As the play progresses the plague is forgotten, and the emphasis shifts from the question Who killed Laius, King of Thebes? to the question Who is Oedipus and what is his relationship with the last royal house?

The man for whom he is hunting is himself. By the time the truth is fully disclosed Jocasta has committed suicide. Oedipus isolates himself from the world by blinding himself and begs to go into exile, as the Delphic oracle had commanded, and as everything in the play so far has led one to expect he will. Unfortunately, at this point (v. 1423), with more than a hundred lines before the printed texts of the play end (v. 1530), genuine Sophocles is almost wholly replaced by the work of at least one interpolator. Creaon reappears, now as regent, and refuses to let Oedipus go into exile until, wholly unnecessarily, the oracle should have been consulted once again; and Oedipus's children, Antigone and Ismene (unnamed in this play), are brought on for what was intended to be, but fails to be, a scene of farewell. It is almost certain that this refashioning of the genuine end was designed to remove any conflict between this play and the presuppositions of Oedipus at Colonus and took place at a time when the two plays were produced together in a revival, perhaps with Antigone as a third.

Since Laius had been the aggressor on the road and Oedipus had been greatly outnumbered and knew nothing of the identity of the man he killed, he is by all human standards guiltless. A good man, the father of his people, he exhibits all those qualities of intelligence that the renowned Antigone ode had celebrated; yet he meets with the ruin that the gods had mapped out for him even before he was born. No wonder posterity has felt itself deeply stirred by this drama, even without the hidden horrors of incest and the heightened awareness of those forces at work within the family and within the subconscious mind that were disclosed by Sigmund Freud in what he christened "the Oedipus complex."

"Tragic irony," whereby a character's words carry a deeper and more sinister meaning for the audience than the character speaking them intends to impart, is all pervasive in this play. There is a different and larger-scale kind of irony, too, best exemplified by the messenger from Corinth who comes to bring the news that Polybus is dead and the vacant throne is to be offered to Oedipus. This news is first taken, erroneously, as falsifying the prediction that Oedipus was destined to kill his father; and one need go no further afield to find another piece of irony, this time resting upon the shameless but dramatically economical use of coincidence: this same messenger was once involved in the movements of the exposed infant Oedipus. But even if the plot owes its forward impetus to such adventitious devices, and even if its principal character is endowed with a strangely selective ignorance of certain vital facts, an ignorance without which the play could not begin to work, these are all matters that are only recognized once a spectator or reader is released from excitement and looks back over the play as a calm logician no longer caught up in the rapid development of the story. All in all, both in conception and execution, Oedipus Rex stands as a virtuoso display of taut dramatic writing that has never been excelled.

Philoctetes , like Electra, is a study in embittered isolation, this time not of a woman confined within a palace but of a hero of the Trojan War, abandoned on an island where he is free to roam but is denied human company. He has been marooned there since a snakebite left his foot festering, with a stench that made his company unendurable to his fellow soldiers. But now they have been told by an oracle that without Philoctetes and his bow, once the property of Heracles, Troy cannot be taken. It is characteristic of Sophocles that an oracular response should play a prominent part in the story and characteristic of him, too, that there should be some vagueness in terms of the plot, the vagueness on this occasion relating to the oracle itself. Did it say that Philoctetes and his bow were required at Troy -- or only that his bow was?

The persons deputed by the Greek expeditionary force to take Philoctetes off the island of Lemnos are Odysseus and Neoptolemus, two contrasting figures: the one perfectly prepared to lie to secure his objective, the other the noble young son of Achilles, whom Odysseus hopes to manipulate as his agent, knowing that he himself is anathema to Philoctetes. It is the interplay of character between the members of this trio that lends the play its particular charm; that, and the exquisite choral passages in which the chorus expresses its insight into and sympathy for the hero -- lonely, ragged, but still of undiminished greatness.

Each of the other six extant plays of Sophocles contains at least one death. Philoctetes does not, and what is at issue is, at any rate in the short term, who will win the contest of wills -- the immovable Philoctetes or the scheming Odysseus? Mixed in with this is the question: Will Neoptolemus remain true to his own nature and side with Philoctetes, in whom he recognizes a kindred spirit, or will he follow orders and do whatever he is told to do by the experienced politician for the greater glory of Greece? Not a life-or-death dilemma, therefore, but something different and in a way more intractable. Death may at least provide a clear-cut solution, but Sophocles' choice is between having his uncompromising hero compromise after all or rewriting mythology by having Troy fall without either Philoctetes or his bow.

The answer comes at the end of the play with a deus ex machina. The use of this Latin phrase has been much debased in common parlance: it is rare indeed in Greek tragedy for a god to appear for the purpose of resolving what had seemed irresolvable. But Philoctetes is the prime exception: Heracles appears and instructs Philoctetes to go to Troy, where he and Neoptolemus will win immortal glory. It is not an entirely satisfactory ending, but it preserves the data of mythology without bringing in its aftermath compromise from either side. In a way one may feel the truer ending has already been given: Neoptolemus has sided with Philoctetes. As with Antigone, the personal element has vanquished the political.

The last play, Oedipus at Colonus , is also the longest -- 1,779 verses against an average for the other plays of 1,427 -- and that length may possibly owe something to interpolation by those who wished to develop yet further the already ample political speechifying. In this drama the blind Oedipus, now in exile, arrives in his wanderings at the holy precinct of the Eumenides at Colonus, near Athens. He is accompanied by his daughter Antigone, and Ismene soon joins them with news that Oedipus's sons Polynices and Eteocles are at odds with each other as to who shall rule Thebes. Oedipus, now an old man, is soon to die. An oracle has predicted that possession of his tomb will ensure the safety of whatever country may have it within its borders. First Creon arrives from Thebes to solicit Oedipus's return. He is unsuccessful, and his attempt to apply pressure by kidnapping Antigone and Ismene is frustrated by Theseus, King of Athens, in whose domain Colonus lies. Then Polynices comes to appeal for help in his struggle against his brother. Oedipus curses him, for in this play, too, as in Ajax, Electra, and Philoctetes, the theme of the bitterness of a character betrayed by those close to him still has its role to play. But the end for Oedipus is to be something exceptional. In thunder and lightning he disappears; how, only Theseus, the only other person present at the time, knows. For Athens the important thing is that Oedipus died, or was gathered to join the immortal gods, on Athenian territory.

Likely enough, Oedipus at Colonus reflects the political tensions current at the time it was written. Centuries later those tensions are not shared by modern readers or a modern audience; and for that reason, and also because of the disproportionate amount of hypocrisy, sheer bad temper, and other unlovely qualities that abound in it, the play is likely to remain low on the list of Sophoclean scholars' favorites. But in the actual manipulation of language there is no sign that the powers of the ninety-year-old author were failing; and the story that some of the choral passages were recited in court to prove that the poet was compos mentis when others were trying to hold otherwise, whether actually true or merely ben trovato, is from the standpoint of the literary critic entirely plausible.

It is extremely difficult to convey to the reader who is not proficient in Greek what the distinctive elements of Sophocles' style are. It lacks the massive rough-hewn quality of Aeschylus and equally the deliberate avoidance of grandeur often detectable in Euripides . However, two points may be singled out. The first is a purely technical one: Sophocles is fond of using nouns and verbs in juxtaposition in such a way that the noun discharges some of the expected function of the verb and vice versa. One example comes as early as the second line in what most editions print as their first play, Ajax, where the transmitted text reads: "hunting to pull off some attempt on your enemies." This line several scholars independently, and to all appearance more logically but still erroneously, have sought to emend to read: "attempting to pull off some hunt against your enemies." Another example, from the countless ones available, is the almost casual use of a two-word phrase, a "wound blinded," meaning a blinding wound. Any other poet would have thought himself adventurous if he had written "a blinding wounded," that is, inflicted as a wound; but Sophocles goes one step further, almost reversing the roles of noun and verb.

The second feature of style that should be noted is Sophocles' use of particles, that is to say small words that are often best rendered in English by a modification of word order or an altered inflexion in the voice. Sophocles is an absolute master in their deployment, and this helps to contribute to the unique effect of his diction, whereby a lofty and artificial manner of speaking somehow still lets one hear the words and accents that would be coming from the mouths of the characters if they were holding their conversations in one's presence, extempore, in real life. This characteristic of style ideally matches the use of traditional mythology to explore such common concerns of humanity as duty, free will, and destiny; and it is this blend of qualities that, for many, places Sophocles on the pinnacle of Greek dramatic art.